Jimmie Lunceford - A Musical World Onto Himself

© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Jimmie Lunceford's music redeemed the sentimental excesses of the swing era with dynamic two-beat rhythms, bravura arrangements, and an overall charm that managed to appear calculating and ingenuous at the same time. His was a musical world onto itself: whimsical yet disciplined, flashy yet innovative. Because Lunceford's showmanship lent itself to fey singers and a stock of novelty songs from minstrelsy, vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley, his recordings may require a stronger taste for irony than those of Henderson, Ellington, or Basie. But in its originality, the Lunceford band stands with those three as one of the most influential orchestras of the '30s.

Lunceford compensated for his seeming lack of profundity with his own "three Ps": Punctuality, Precision, and Presentation. He had the nattiest looking band of the day, with smartly uniformed musicians waving derby mutes and tossing their instruments into the air, but he never succumbed to the cynical party-hat conviviality of such cornpone hacks as Kay Kyser. On the contrary, he used his three Ps to augment the elements of hard jazz: fervent swing, audacious writing, heady solos. To these he added the suggestion of a Panglossian conviction that the music he celebrated (American music in all its motley) was as good as music could be. He made art out of commercial slickness.

Unlike the other figures associated with distinct big band styles, he had little direct impact as composer, arranger, or instrumentalist. In assigning authorship of the Lunceford sound to Lunceford, we are merely acknowledging his captaincy of the ship—the regal-looking commander with the baton. Perhaps this isn't fair. Jazz has upset several accepted notions of Western music, most especially what a composer does and how his role is defined. The distinction between composition and improvisation is blurred by composer-performers like Louis Armstrong or Lester Young, who produced comprehensive musical styles without much recourse to paperwork. Similarly, a jazz bandleader (unless hired strictly for show because of a pretty face or famous name) does some of the work of a composer in selecting talent and delegating responsibility. Lunceford's sound may have reached its apogee in the writing of his most gifted arranger, Sy Oliver, but the fact remains that neither Oliver (notwithstanding several famous arrangements he later wrote for Tommy Dorsey), nor Trummy Young, Joe Thomas, Willie Smith, and Jimmy Crawford, not to mention lesser luminaries such as Eddie Wilcox, Paul Webster, and Eddie Tompkins, would ever again create as memorable a body of work as they did under his authoritarian rule. He knew what he wanted and how to get musicians to give it to him.”

- Garry Giddins, Visions of Jazz: The First Century

In its peak years, from 1937 to 1941, the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra performed with a polish and showmanship that was unmatched by any other big band. Lunceford's demand for perfection earned the group a reputation for ensemble precision that influenced big bands into the 1950s. Hie reed parts, in particular, prefigured the kind of virtuosic technique (hat became the norm in modern jazz.

Lunceford grew up in Denver, Colorado. The son of a choirmaster, he learned to play saxophone, flute, guitar, and trombone. In high school, he studied music with Wilberforce J. Whiteman, the father of bandleader Paul Whiteman, subsequently playing alto sax in George Morrison's orchestra (1922). While enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville he traveled to New York to take music courses at City College and to work in dance bands. After receiving a bachelor's degree in music from Fisk in 1926, he began teaching music at Manassa High School in Memphis.

In 1927 Lunceford organized a student jazz band, which spent the next few summers performing at a resort in Lakeside, Ohio. Two years later, (lie group turned professional, strengthened by the addition of three men whom he had met at Fisk: saxophonist Willie Smith, pianist Edwin Wilcox, and trombonist Henry Wells. Following extended engagements in Cleveland and Buffalo, the band performed at the Lafayette Theatre in New York, and in January 1934 they began an important residency at Harlem's Cotton Club. This job, together with cross-country touring and a series of recordings made for Decca, established their reputation nationally.

The sound of the band in the early 1930s reflected Lunceford's admiration for Alphonso Trent's orchestra, a southwestern-territory band that featured bluesy, riff-based numbers. By 1935, however, a more sophisticated and distinctive "Lunceford sound" had emerged. This was partly the result of the intricate reed-section writing introduced in Wilcox's and Smith's arrangements. Most important were the scores contributed by Sy Oliver (1910—88), a trumpeter, singer, and self-taught arranger who had joined the band in late 1933. The brilliantly unpredictable interplay between soloists and brass and reed sections that Oliver conceived on tunes such as "For Dancers Only," "Margie," and "Organ Grinder's Swing" set a high standard for Swing Era arrangers. The two-beat rhythm that he preferred for medium-tempo tunes produced an unusually buoyant feeling.

Oliver's scores also supported the group's soloists, including tenor saxophonist Joe Thomas, trombonist James "Trummy" Young, Eddie Durham, both a trombonist and a pioneer of the electric guitar, high-note trumpeter Eugene "Snooky" Young, and Willie Smith, reed-section coach and virtuoso alto-sax soloist. The band was visually exciting, with swaying trombones and trumpets pointing skyward. According to Oliver, the band's spirit enabled it to perform "way over its head."

A grueling schedule of one-nighters eventually eroded this spirit. Sy Oliver, the band's principal arranger, left to work for Tommy Dorsey in 1939. By 1943 younger and often more skilled musicians had replaced many of the original members, but they were unable to recapture the band's luster. Their recordings were often remakes of earlier hits. While on tour in 1947 Lunceford died of a heart attack during an autograph session, Wilcox and Thomas took over the group, which finally disbanded in 1950. [Sources: Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era and Len Lyons and Don Perlo, Jazz Portraits: The Lives and Music of the Jazz Masters].

Here’s what George T. Simon, a noted authority on big bands and who for many years covered them for Metronome magazine had to say about the Lunceford Orchestra in his definitive 4th edition of The Big Bands.

“WHAT must go down in dance band history as the greatest gathering of the clan took place in New York's Manhattan Center on the night of November 18, 1940, when Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Glen Gray, Les Brown, Guy Lombardo, Will Bradley, Sammy Kaye and twenty other big bands wowed six thousand enthusiastic fans without a letup from eight in the evening until four the next morning.

In this marathon, MC'd by disc jockey Martin Block, all the bands were scheduled to play fifteen-minute sets—and all except one of those twenty-eight bands got off the stage when it was supposed to. But that one couldn't, for the simple reason that along about midnight it broke the show wide open, to such hollering and cheering and shouting for "More!" that no other band could get on stage until Jimmie Lunceford's was allowed to play some extra tunes.

That this fantastic outfit could top all the others in a show of this sort came as no surprise to those of us who had seen it in action before, and probably comes as no surprise to any reader who ever caught the band during its heyday. For Jimmie Lunceford's was without a doubt the most exciting big band of all time!

Its music was great, but not that much greater than that of several other top swing bands' and, in fact, not as consistently brilliant, perhaps, as one or two others'. But the Lunceford band was so far ahead of all the rest in one department - showmanship  - that when it came to any battle of the bands, none could touch it.

It was the sort of band that no one with even the slightest feel for swing could stand in front of and stand still. It propelled a fantastically joyous swinging beat, and.the musicians projected it with uninhibited, completely infectious enthusiasm.

It was not a band that relied on star soloists, though it did have several outstanding jazz men. Instead, it emphasized ensemble sounds, brilliant brass, sweeping saxes and a wonderfully buoyant rhythm section, all playing some of the swingingest arrangements of all time.

There was constant aural and visual interplay among the musicians. The trumpets would throw their horns in the air together; the saxes would almost charge off the stage, so enthusiastically did they blow their horns; the trombones would slip their slides toward the skies; and throughout the evening the musicians would be kidding and shouting at one another, projecting an aura of irresistible exuberance.

In front of all this stood Lunceford, a big, impressive-looking man with a huge smile and baton to match, supervising and controlling the entire proceedings. He may not have displayed the flash of a Goodman or a Dorsey or an Ellington or a James, but as Sy Oliver, the man responsible for so much of the band's music, recently emphasized, "Make no mistake about it, Jimmie definitely was a leader. He was a strict disciplinarian, like a teacher in a schoolroom, but he was consistent in everything he did, and that gave the fellows in the band a feeling of security."

Lunceford had started out as an athletic director at a Memphis, Tennessee, high school; in fact, he had coached some of the musicians who later worked in his band. He had been graduated from Fisk University and had also taken graduate courses at the City College of New York. The band, organized in Memphis in the late twenties, began developing into a mature unit during annual summer engagements in Lakeside, Ohio.

After establishing a name for itself in Buffalo, it came to New York City in 1933, appearing at the Cotton Club. It recorded several numbers that, as Oliver now points out, were not at all typical of the band's music. Such racing flag wavers as "White Heat" and "Jazznocracy" were written for the band by Will Hudson, a white arranger who was working for Irving Mills, the influential music publisher, who was helping the band and who wanted to get his firm's music, which included Hudson's originals, performed on records and on the air.

The real Jimmie Lunceford music was far more relaxed. Its style has often been referred to as "the Lunceford two beat," a light, loping, swing, created and developed by Oliver. Sy, a bright, broad-faced, intelligent trumpeter, who never studied arranging in his life, came from a musical family. Originally his parents had wanted him to study piano, but athletics intrigued him more. Finally, he acquiesced sufficiently to take up the trumpet and, after his father died, played seriously enough to land a job in Zack White's band, for which he also began to arrange, picking up his own technique. "One day in Cincinnati," he recalls, "I heard the Lunceford band rehearsing. I was so impressed, because Jimmie was so careful about every single detail, that I asked him if I could try writing for the band." Lunceford said yes, so Oliver wrote several arrangements for him. Soon thereafter came an offer to join the band. Sy grabbed it.

Right from the start, Oliver began turning out brilliant scores, many of which have survived through the years as the most outstanding in the Lunceford library — "Swanee River," "My Blue Heaven," "Four or Five Times," "Organ Grinder's Swing," "On the Beach at Bali Bali," "For Dancers Only," "Margie," "Cheatin' on Me," "Dream of You," a tune that Sy wrote, plus his own favorite arrangement of "By the River St. Marie." The band recorded it for Decca, but, Sy says, "We never did get to do the full arrangement of 'St. Marie' because it ran six minutes and that was too long for those old seventy-eight sides." Oliver also wrote another tune, which he liked very much but which Lunceford apparently didn't. Jimmie may have turned it down, but Tommy Dorsey, for whom Sy later arranged, didn't. He recorded and made a big hit out of "Yes, Indeed!"

Though praised by many musicians, Oliver's arrangements were curiously deprecated during an interview I had early in 1946 with none other than Sy Oliver himself. "Those arrangements," he insisted, "they were all just alike. I couldn't write. It's just that those guys played so well. Anybody could have written for that band."

The point, of course, is that nobody else did write like that for the Lunceford band, nor for Dorsey's band, nor for Billy May's band, nor for Sam Donahue's, nor for any of the many others which paid Oliver the supreme compliment by basing their styles on his.

Not that everything Sy did was always accepted. Jimmie Crawford, the great drummer, whose simple but always swinging playing inspired the Lunceford band for such a long time, at first wasn't completely sold on Oliver's penchant for emphasizing two instead of four beats in each measure. "Sy would say 'Drop it in two,' and I'd maybe show I didn't agree with him, and so he'd say, ' What's wrong with two beats?' and I'd answer, 'Well, there are two beats missing, that's all.' I felt that if you were really going home in those last ride-out choruses, then you should really go home all the way, full steam and stay in four-four instead of going back into that two-four feel again. Oh yes, Sy and I would have some terrific arguments all right, but then we'd kiss and make up right away." Apparently Sy and Jimmie hear better ear-to-ear these days, because on almost every recording date Sy now conducts, he uses Jimmie on drums. Crawford, by the way, is one of today's most sought-after drummers for Broadway musicals: his drive and his spirit remain as contagious as ever.

Oliver wasn't the only arranger in the band. Several other musicians wrote scores, and one of them, pianist Edwin Wilcox, has been tabbed by Sy as "one of the most underrated musicians in the business. People don't realize how much he contributed to the band. He did as much as I did, and he definitely was the man responsible for all those beautiful sax ensemble choruses that we used to play. Don't ever overlook him, please!"

The sax choruses were blown by a section led by a fine alto man, the late Willie Smith, who also sang some cute vocals, and who later became a mainstay of the Harry James, Charlie Spivak, and in the mid-sixties the Charlie Barnet sax teams. Playing with him were Joe Thomas, a fine tenor saxist, considered by many to have been the outstanding soloist in the band, who also sang; Earl (Jock) Carruthers, an especially spirited baritone saxist; and Dan Grissom (called "Dan Gruesome" by his deprecators), who for many years was also the band's chief ballad vocalist.

The trumpets, in addition to Oliver, spotted a great lead man in Eddie Tompkins and, in the early years, a high-note screecher named Tommy Stevenson, who was replaced by an equally stratospheric trumpeter named Paul Webster.

The trombonists featured a very funny fellow named Elmer Crumbley, an outstanding, soft singer, Henry Wells, who also arranged, and, for a while, a good jazz soloist, Eddie Durham, who doubled wonderfully on electric guitar, an instrument seldom heard during the mid-thirties. Later James (Trummy) Young joined the band and provided it with some of its outstanding jazz trombone and vocal moments.

After Oliver left, Trummy replaced him in the vocal trio which had previously projected such a wonderfully light, free-swinging sound on "My Blue Heaven" and "Four or Five Times." According to Oliver, "nobody in the group could really sing, but yet no group could sound like that."

Both in regard to the vocal trio and to the band as a whole, it is Sy's contention that "the whole was three times as great as the individual components. The band played way over its head simply because of its tremendous spirit. The guys were all individualists. They were all characters in their own fashion. And each one of them was a definite personality."

The characters and their personalities were always there for all to see and hear. This, according to Lunceford, accounted for much of the band's success. "A band that looks good, goes in for a better class of showmanship, and seems to be enjoying its work," he said in the early forties, "will always be sure of a return visit wherever it plays."

"We did have a barrel of fun," Oliver says. "Jock Carruthers was really the playmaker of the band. He was always up to something. I remember one night after we'd finished work around two in the morning and we'd all gotten nice and settled on the bus and suddenly this alarm clock went off. We couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Finally we located it in the bottom of the luggage—in Carruthers' bag. He'd set it to go off at six in the morning!

"So then Paul Webster decided he'd go Jock one better, and one night he put two alarm clocks in his bag, and just to make sure everybody'd hear them, he put them in two pie plates. What a racket that made!"

Traveling was something the Lunceford band did a great deal of. Jimmie recapped some statistics in 1942 as follows: "We do a couple of hundred one-nighters a year, fifteen to twenty weeks of theaters, maybe one four-week location and two weeks of vacation. All in all, we cover about forty thousand miles a year!"

The men got along together surprisingly well, considering the conditions under which they were forced to work. Other top (white) outfits could stay in big cities for weeks at a time, and therefore could benefit by playing the name spots and getting exposure through radio shots. But Lunceford, apparently resigned to the facts of life, rationalized that air time, of which the band still had some, was not that important. He indicated that recordings were more powerful, and he'd point out that if you made a mistake on records, you could try again, but when you made one on live broadcasts, there was nothing you could do about it.

Pride and internal competition buoyed the band's spirits. The brass and sax teams kept trying to outplay each other. If one section made a mistake, the other gloated—often to the accompaniment of stomping feet. "But Jimmie finally stopped that," relates Oliver. "He claimed all those feet stomping ruined the broadcasts."

One exciting bit of showmanship the brass introduced was the waving of derby hats, an effect Glenn Miller picked up and utilized so extensively with his band. Says Oliver: "That was Stevie's idea. [Stevie was Tommy Stevenson.] He was full of ideas like that. The only trouble was that Eddie [Tompkins] and I would remember them, and then he'd be the one who'd forget what to do!"

And something else in the trumpet section bothered Oliver: "I was a lousy trumpet player. If I'd been a leader, I would never have hired me for a record date." However, Sy's opinion of his playing doesn't jibe with that of many others. He was, I always felt, the most interesting trumpet soloist in the band — not as flashy as the others but very musical and warm and emotional. What none of us realized, though, as we listened to what we thought were such great extemporaneous jazz passages, was that Sy had prepared everyone in advance. "I could never ad-lib the way the others did. The way I worked it, I'd write out my chorus and then I'd start building my arrangement around it. It was like taking a mediocre picture and putting it in a good frame so that it seems better than it really is. And you know what? I still use the same formula when I arrange for mediocre singers today.

"Another thing I used to do when I wrote for the band was to write with the various guys' limitations in mind. That way there'd be a minimum of trouble."

When I first reviewed the band in 1936 at the Larchmont Casino just outside New York City, I found it had some surprising limitations. Before then I'd heard it only on recordings. On location I was quite shocked to discover that the saxes especially sounded very ragged on some of the tunes they had not recorded. "Sad displays of out-of-tune slop" is how I described it. Two years later though, such deficiencies had pretty well disappeared and the band had developed a consistency that was truly remarkable. I can't recall any succession of evenings more exciting than those I spent listening to the Lunceford band, night after night, during its stay in the summer of 1940 at the Fiesta Danceteria above the Rialto Theater in New York's Times Square.

Its style had changed somewhat by then. It still played many of Oliver's famous arrangements, but it also performed some by Billy Moore, who had taken over as chief writer and who contributed the score for the band's big hit recording, "What's Your Story, Morning Glory?"

Sy had left the band for no better reason than, as he said it, "I'd grown tired of traveling. I felt I was going out of the world backwards. I wanted to stay in New York and study and write. But Jimmie didn't want me to go until he could find another trumpet player to take my place. He kept me in the band until I just quit one night, and then I found out that he had had Gerald Wilson waiting in New York all the time, ready to come in as soon as I cut out." That's when Oliver joined Tommy Dorsey.

The Lunceford band continued to sound good for a while longer. Late in 1941 I heard it at the Paramount and found it to be great, with the trumpet section of Wilson, Webster and Snooky Young especially impressive and Dan Grissom a vastly improved singer.

About a year later I caught Lunceford again at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and I was so thrilled that I sat through several shows, just as one would sit through several sets if the band were playing in a regular spot — something it was doing distressingly seldom during those days. Some more new members impressed me too: Freddy Webster, a brilliant young trumpeter, and Truck Parham, a stronger bassist than Mose Allen had ever been, though no bassist could match Mose for contagious spirit.

But the great over-all Lunceford band enthusiasm was beginning to fade. "Most of the replacements were better musicians," Oliver agrees, "but they didn't bring the same spirit into the band. That could never be duplicated." Jimmie Crawford cites another reason for the band's eventual deterioration. "We never created anything new. It was always the same old stuff. Jimmie wouldn't spend money on enough good new arrangements."

The sad part of it all, as Crawford found out in later years, was that Lunceford was not in control of the band's finances. "We thought so all the time we were working for Jimmie. But then we discovered that Jimmie was working for Harold Oxley, that Oxley owned the band and we were working for him too, and that Jimmie was just getting a salary like the rest of us."

Soon Crawford and Willie Smith and Paul Webster and Trummy Young and Freddy Webster and others had left. Eddie Tompkins, who had gone into the Army, had been killed during war maneuvers. Al Norris had been drafted. When I caught the band during a very desultory theater engagement in the summer of 1944, only Carruthers, Thomas, Wilcox and trombonist Russell Bowles were there as reminders of the brilliant crew that had once created such sensational music.

"Jimmie made one mistake," notes Oliver in assessing the causes of the band's decline. "He kept looking for good musicianship, good character and intelligence, and he found it all. But so many of the guys were so intelligent that, as they matured, they realized there were other things in life more worthwhile than traveling all year and living in bad hotels."

For several more years the Lunceford band kept plugging away, continuing to travel — and to live in depressing places. But it was never the same. It remained a splendidly routined band (I recorded it for V-Discs and it cut six sides in one hour, which was some sort of record for efficiency), for Jimmie was, to the end, a first-class leader. "The end" came on July 16, 1947, when the band was once again on the road—this time in Oregon, where Jimmie suffered a fatal heart attack.

The band tried carrying on under Edwin Wilcox and Joe Thomas, two of its great stalwarts, but the attempt failed and it wasn't long before the Jimmie Lunceford band passed from the scene for good.

But what great music it left! For many it remains, pressed in the grooves of all the fine Decca and Columbia records it made. And for those of us lucky enough to have caught the band in person it has also left memories of some of the most exciting nights we ever spent listening to any of the big bands!”

The following video features Jimmie Lunceford’s Orchestra performing Sy Oliver’s arrangement of For Dancers Only.

Jazz Big Band Composer-Arrangers: What They Do and How They Do It

© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Have you ever wondered why a Jazz big band works the way it does, let alone, how it works at all?

Why the instrumentation is the way it is - generally 4 trumpets, 3-4 trombones, 5 saxes and a rhythm section made up of piano, bass and drums with a guitar added to it on occasion?

How the music they play is organized, arranged and constructed?

The very best explanation I have found to the question of how and why a Jazz big band works the way it does - especially one that includes a historical perspective on how the craft [or art, if you prefer] evolved - is contained in the following essay by the late, esteemed Jazz author, Gene Lees.

Pencil Pushers

JazzLetter

November 1998

“One sunny summer evening when I was about thirteen, I saw crowds of people pouring into the hockey arena in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Curious to know what was attracting them, I parked my bicycle behind the arena (in those days one had little fear that one's bicycle would be stolen) and, in the manner of boys of that age, I sneaked in a back exit. What was going on was a big band. I remember watching as dark-skinned musicians in tuxedos assembled on the stage, holding bright shining brass instruments, taking their seats behind music stands. And then a man sat down at the piano and played something and this assemblage hit me with a wall of sound I can still hear in my head, not to mention my heart. I now can even tell you the name of the piece: it was Take the "A " Train, that it was written by one Billy Strayhorn, that the band was that of Duke Ellington, and that the year had to be 1941, for that is the copyright date of that piece.

I learned that bands like this came to the arena every Saturday night in the summer, and I went back the following Saturday and heard another of them.

I was overwhelmed by the experience, shaken to my shoes. It was not just the soloists, although I remember the clowning and prancing and trumpet playing of someone I realized, in much later retrospect, was Ray Nance with Ellington, and a tenor saxophone player who leaned over backwards almost to the stage floor, and that had to have been Joe Thomas with Jimmie Lunceford. With both bands, it was the totality of the sound that captivated me, that radiant wall of brass and saxes and what I would learn to call the rhythm section.

I discussed the experience with my Uncle Harry. When I told him about these bands I'd seen, he encouraged my interest and told me I should pay attention as well to someone called Count Basie.

My Uncle Harry — Henry Charles Flatman, born in London, England — was a trombone player and an arranger He played in Canadian dance-bands in the 1920s and '30s, and I would hear their "remote" broadcasts on the radio. Once one of the bandleaders dedicated a song to me on the air. I am told that I could identify any instrument in the orchestra by its sound by the time I was three, but that may be merely romantic family lore.

But what held these instruments together in ensemble passages? I even knew that: people like my Uncle Harry. I remember him sitting at an upright oaken piano with some sort of big board, like a drawing board, propped above the keyboard. He always had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and one eye would squint to protect itself from the rising tendrils of smoke, while his pencil made small marks on a big paper mounted on that board: score paper, I realized within a few years. He was, I'm sure he explained to me, writing "arrangements" for the band he played in. I seem to recall that he was the first person to tell me the difference between a major and minor chord.

Because of him I was always aware that the musicians in a band weren't just making it up, except in the solos. Somebody wrote the passages they played together.

And so from my the earliest days I looked on the record labels for the parenthesized names under the song titles to see who wrote a given piece. When the title wasn't that of some popular song and the record was an instrumental, then chances were that the name was that of the man who composed and arranged it. Whether I learned their names from the record labels or from Metronome or Down Beat, I followed with keen interest the work of the arrangers. I became aware of Eddie Durham, whose name was on Glenn Miller's Sliphorn Jive which I just loved (he was actually a Basie arranger); Paul Weston and Axel Stordahl who wrote for Tommy Dorsey; Jerry Gray, who wrote A String of Pearls, and Bill Finegan, who arranged Little Brown Jug, both for Glenn Miller; and above all Fletcher Henderson, who wrote much of the book (as I would later learn to call it) of the Benny Goodman band. Later, I became aware of Mel Powell's contributions to the Goodman library, such as Mission to Moscow and The Earl, as well as those of Eddie Sauter, including Benny Rides Again and Clarinet a la King, Jimmy Mundy's contributions to that band included Swing-time in the Rockies and Solo Flight, which introduced many listeners to the brilliance of guitarist Charlie Christian; and Gene Gifford, who wrote Smoke Rings and Casa Loma Stomp for the Casa Loma Orchestra led by Glen Gray.

The better bandleaders always gave credit to their arrangers, whether of "originals" or standards such as I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, and I became aware of Skip Martin (who wrote that chart), Ben Homer and Frank Comstock with Les Brown, and Ralph Burns, Shorty Rogers, and Neal Hefti with Woody,Herman, Ray Conniff with the postwar Artie Shaw band ('Swonderful and Jumpin' on the Merry Go Round are his charts) and, later, Bill Holman with various bands, and then Thad Jones and Gerald Wilson. Some of the arrangers became bandleaders themselves, including Russ Morgan (whose commercial band gave no hint that he had been an important jazz arranger), Larry Clinton, and Les Brown. And of course, there was Duke Ellington, though he was not an arranger who became a bandleader but a bandleader who evolved into an arranger— and one of the most important composers in jazz, some would say the most important.

One error: I assumed that Duke Ellington wrote everything his band played, only later becoming aware of the enormous role of Billy Strayhorn, who was kept more or less in the background. Strayhorn of course, not Ellington, wrote the band's latter-year theme, Take the "A " Train. I was aware very early that someone named Gerry Mulligan — scarcely older than I, although I did not know that then — wrote Disc Jockey Jump for Gene Krupa, and someone named Gil Evans did some gorgeous writing for the Claude Thornhill band.

I daresay the arranger I most admired was Sy Oliver. It was many years later that I met him. He wrote the arrangements for an LP Charles Aznavour recorded in English. I wrote most of the English translations and adaptations for that session, and about all I can remember about the date is the awe I felt in shaking the hand of Sy Oliver.

I was captivated by the Tommy Dorsey band of that period. From about 1939 on, I thought it was the hottest band around. I did not then know that Sy Oliver was the reason.

He was born Melvin James Oliver in Battle Creek, Michigan, on December 17, 1910. He began as a trumpet player and, like so many arrangers, trained himself, probably by copying down what he heard on records. In 1933, he joined the Jimmie Lunceford band, playing trumpet and writing for it, and it is unquestionable that some of the arrangements I was listening to that night in Niagara Falls were his. Others were surely by Gerald Wilson.

A few years after his death, Sy's widow, Lillian, told me that Lunceford paid Sy poorly and Sy was about to leave the music business, return to school and become a lawyer. He got a call to have a meeting with Tommy Dorsey. Dorsey told him he would pay him $5,000 a year more (a considerable sum in the 1940s) than whatever Lunceford was giving him, pay him well for each individual arrangement as opposed to the $2.50 per chart (including copying) he got from Lunceford, and give him full writing credits and attendant royalties for his work if Sy would join his band. Furthermore, he told Sy that if he would give him a year, he, Tommy, would rebuild the band in whatever way Sy wanted.

Sy took the offer, and Tommy rebuilt the band that had in the past been known for Marie and Song of India and the like. It became the band of Don Lodice, Freddy Stulce, Chuck Peterson, Ziggy Elman, Joe Bushkin, and above all Buddy Rich, who gave it the drive Sy wanted and whom Sy loved. The change was as radical as that in the Woody Herman band from the Band that Plays the Blues to the First Herd of Caldonia and Your Fathers Mustache. It became a sort of projection of Sy Oliver led by Tommy Dorsey, and Sy's compositions and charts included Well, Git It!, Yes Indeed, Deep River, and, later on (1944) Opus No. 1, on which Lillian Oliver received royalties until the day she died, and their son Jeff does now.

Recently I mentioned to Frank Comstock my admiration for Sy Oliver, and he said, "I think Sy touched all of us who were arranging in the 1940s and '50s and later." And then he told me something significant.

Frank said that he learned arranging by transcribing Jimmie Lunceford records, which doubtless meant many Sy Oliver charts. Frank's first important professional job was with Sonny Dunham. "And he was known, as I'm sure you're aware, as the white Lunceford," Frank said. The reason, Frank said, was that when Dunham was starting up his band, Lunceford gave him a whole book of his own charts to help him get off the ground. And Frank was hired precisely because he could write in that Lunceford-Oliver manner.

In the various attempts to define jazz, emphasis is usually put on improvisation. Bill Evans once went so far as to say to me that if he heard an Eskimo improvising within his musical system, assuming there was one, he would define that as jazz. It is an answer that will not do.

There are many kinds of music that are based on, or at least rely heavily on, improvisation, including American bluegrass, Spanish flamenco, Greek dance music, Polish polkas, Gypsy string ensembles, Paraguayan harp bands, and Russian balalaika music. They are not jazz. In the early days of the concerto form, the soloist was expected to improvise his cadenzas; and well-trained church organists were expected, indeed required, to be skilled improvisers, up to and including large forms. Gabriel Faure was organist at La Madeleine. Chopin and Liszt were master improvisers, and the former's impromptus are what the name implies: improvisations that he later set down on paper, there being no tape recorders then. Doubtless he revised them, but equally doubtless they originated in spontaneous inventions. Beethoven was a magnificent improviser, not to mention Bach and Mozart.

Those who like to go into awed rapture at the single-line improvisation of a Stan Getz might well consider the curious career of Alexander Borodin. First of all he was one of the leading Russian scientists of his time, a practicing surgeon and chemist, a professor at the St. Petersburg Medico-Surgical Academy. (He took his doctorate on his thesis on the analogy of arsenic acid with phosphoric acid.) Music was never more than a relaxing hobby for him, and his double career raises some interesting questions about our modern theories on left-brain logical thought and right-brain imaging and spatial information processing. Borodin improvised his symphonies before writing them down. And if that seems impressive musicianship, consider Glazunov's. Borodin never wrote his Third Symphony down at all: he improvised the first two movements and fyis friend Glazunov wrote out the first two movements from memory in the summer of 1887, a few months after Borodin's death. (He constructed a third movement out of materials left over from other Borodin works, including the opera Prince Igor.)

Most of the Borodin Third Symphony, then, is improvised music. I can't imagine that anyone, even Bill Evans (if he were here), would try to call it jazz.

How then are we to define jazz?

The remark "if you have to ask, you ain't never gonna know," attributed to both Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, is clearly unsatisfactory, though a certain kind of jazz lover likes to quote it for reasons that remain obscure. You could say that about many kinds of music. It is an evasion of the difficulty of definition.

A simple definition won't cover all the contingencies, and a complex one will prove ponderous and even meaningless. Even if you offer one of those clumsy (and not fully accurate) definitions such as "an American musical form emphasizing improvisation and a characteristic swing and based on African rhythmic and European harmonic and melodic influences," you have come up with something that conveys nothing to a person who has never heard it. Furthermore, the emphasis on improvisation has always been disproportionate. Many outstanding jazz musicians, including Art Tatum and Louis Armstrong, played solos they had worked out and played the same way night after night. Nat Cole's piano in the heads of such hits as Embraceable You were carefully worked out and played the same way repeatedly. Bandleaders of the era would tell you their players had to play solos exactly as they did on the records. Otherwise, some of the audience to a live performance would consider itself cheated or, worse, argue that the player wasn't the same one who had performed on the record.

If improvisation will not do as the sole defining characteristic of jazz, and if non-improvisation, as in solos by Louis Armstrong and Art Tatum, does not make it not jazz, then what does define it?

If it does not cease to be jazz because the soloist sometimes is not improvising, neither does it cease to be jazz because it is written. It would be difficult to argue that what McKinney's Cotton Pickers played wasn't jazz. The multi-instrumentalist and composer Don Redman — who wrote for Fletcher Henderson's band before Henderson did — became music director of the Cotton Pickers in 1927 and transformed it in a short time from a novelty group into one of the major jazz orchestras. And its emphasis was not so much on soloists as on the writing: Redman's tightly controlled and precise ensemble arranging, beautifully played.

McKinney's Cotton Pickers was based in Detroit, part of the stable of bands operated by the French-born pianist Jean Goldkette: his National Amusement Corporation fielded more than 20 of them, including one under his own name whose personnel included Frank Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, and Spiegle Willcox (who is still playing). One of Goldkette's bands, the Orange Blossoms, became the Casa Loma Orchestra, with pioneering writing by Gene Gifford. Artie Shaw has argued that the "swing era" began as a popular musical movement not with Benny Goodman but with the Casa Loma. Also in Detroit, Redman was writing for the Cotton Pickers and Bill Challis for the Goldkette band, both bands influencing musicians all over America who listened to them on the radio. Gil Evans in Stockton, California, was listening to Gene Gifford's writing on radio "remotes" by the Casa Loma. Even the Isham Jones band of the 1930s was born in Detroit; it was actually organized by Red Norvo. Given all these factors, there is good reason to consider Detroit — awash in money from both the illegal liquor importation from Canada and the expanding automobile industry and willing to spend it freely on entertainment — the birthplace of the big-band swing era.

But the structural form of the "big band" must be considered the invention of Ferde Grofe’, who wrote for the Art Hickman band that was working in San Francisco and almost certainly was influenced by black musicians who had come there from New Orleans. Hickman hired two saxophone players from vaudeville to function as a "choir" in his dance band. The band caused a sensation, and Paul Whiteman was quick to hire Grofe’ to write for his band, as he was later to hire Bill Challis and various soloists who had been with Goldkette. The band of Paul Specht was also influential, through the new medium of radio broadcasting: its first broadcasts were made as early as 1920. Don Redman for a time worked in the Specht office, and it may well have been the value of his experience there that influenced Fletcher Henderson to hire him. Henderson also hired Bill Challis. Once Henderson got past his classical background and got the hang of this new instrumentation, he became one of the most influential — perhaps, in the larger scale, the most influential — writers of the era.

These explorers had no choice but to experiment with the evolving new instrumentation. There was no academic source from which to derive guidance, there were no treatises on the subject. Classical orchestration texts made little if any reference to the use of saxophones, particularly saxophones in groups. And these "arrangers" solved the problem, each making his own significant contribution. While Duke Ellington was making far-reaching experiments by mixing colors from the instruments of the dance-band format, the Grofe’-Challis-Redman-Henderson-Carter-Oliver axis had the widest influence around the world in the antiphonal use of the "choirs" of the dance-band for high artistic purpose; The instrumentation expanded as time went on. Three saxophones became four, two altos and two tenors, the section's sound vastly deepening when baritone came into widespread use in the 1940s. The brass section too expanded, growing to three trumpets and two trombones, then to four and three, and eventually four and even five trumpets and four trombones, including bass trombone.

This instrumentation may vary, and of late years its range of colors has been extended by the doubling of the saxophone players on flutes and other woodwinds, the occasional addition of French horn (Glenn Miller used a French horn in his Air Force band and Rob McConnell's Boss Brass uses two) and tuba, but structurally the "big band" has remained a superb instrument of expression to the many brilliant writers who have mastered its uses.

The big-band era may be over, but the big-band format is far from moribund. The "ghost" bands go on, though the revel now is ended, and their greatest actors are vanished into air, into thin air: Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and more. The Artie Shaw band goes on, though Shaw does not lead it. It is the only ghost band that has a live ghost. (Woody Herman seems to have invented the term "ghost band" and swore his would never become one. It did.)

Curiously, none of the ghost bands has the spirit, the feel, of the original bands. In ways I have never understood, the leaders of these bands somehow infused them with their own anima. Terry Gibbs has attested that sometimes, when the crowd was thin, Woody Herman would skip the last set and let the band continue on its own; and it never sounded the same as when he was there, Terry said. The current Count Basie band does not have the "feel" of the original. There are of course two things without which a Basie band is not a Basie band: Basie and Freddie Green. But those conspicuous omissions aside, Basie was able to get a groove from that band that eludes his successors.

Far more interesting than the ghost bands are those regional "rehearsal bands" that spring up all over the country, and indeed all over the world, or the recording bands assembled to make albums and, afterwards, dissolved— at least until the next project.

As we begin the twenty-first century, the evolution of jazz as the art of the soloist has slowed and, in the example of many young artists imitating past masters, ceased completely. There is an attempt to institutionalize it in concert halls through of repertory orchestras such as that at Lincoln Center led by Wynton Marsalis, the Liberace of jazz, and a brisk concomitant interest in finding and performing, when possible, the scores of such "arrangers" as George Handy.

There is an inchoate awareness that it somehow isn't quite kosher to imitate the great soloists of the past, though that hasn't deterred some of the younger crop of players from swiping a little Bubber Miley here, a little Dizzy Gillespie there, but it is all right to play music by jazz composers of the past, because written music is meant to be re-created by groups of musicians. And so the emphasis in the current classical-ization of jazz is to a large extent on the writers for past jazz orchestras. In this jazz is being institutionalized as "classical" music has been, the latter for the good reason that Beethoven couldn't leave us his improvisations, he could leave only written music to be re-created by subsequent players.

Much of this re-creative work is rather sterile. It lacks the immediacy, and certainly there is none of the exploratory zeal, that this music had when the "arrangers" first put it on paper. The new stuff being composed and/or arranged is much more interesting. And in any case, all too much of it is focussed on Duke Ellington. This incantatory fervor for Ellington has precluded a fitting concert recognition of Fletcher Henderson, Sy Oliver, Eddie Sauter, Ralph Burns, Bill Finegan, Billy May, and so many more who certainly deserve it. Unnoticed even by the public who admired them, these writers ("arrangers" seems a pathetically inadequate term) were building up a body of work that is not receiving the homage that is its due.

Thirty years ago, it seems to me, the writers in the jazz field were not taken seriously at all by some people. All was improvisation, the illusion being that jazz was fully improvised, rather than being made up of carefully prepared pieces of vocabulary, what jazz musicians call "licks" — chord voicings, approaches to scale patterns, and the like.

The influence of the big-band arrangers has now spread around the world. The format itself survives, of course, though rarely in full-time bands. It is found in the work of certain bands that come together from time to time, such as in the Clarke-Boland Big Band, now alas gone, based in Germany and led by the late Kenny Clarke and the wonderful Belgian arranger and composer Francy Boland. It is encountered today in the Rob McConnell Boss Brass in Toronto, and in Cologne in the WDR (for Westdeutsche Rundfuk) Big Band. Some years ago, I saw a Russian television variety show that included a big band, playing in the American style — not doing it well, to be sure, but doing it. The format survives in countless bands imitating Glenn Miller.

With the end of the big-band era, various of the arrangers for those bands found work elsewhere. Many of them began writing for singers. Marion Evans, alumnus of the postwar Tex Beneke-Glenn Miller band, wrote for Steve Lawrence, Tony Bennett, and many others. So did Don Costa, who wrote for, among his clients, Frank Sinatra. Sinatra's primary post-Dorsey arranger was Axel Stordahl and, later, Nelson Riddle, alumnus of the Charlie Spivak band. Peter Matz, alumnus of the Maynard Ferguson band, wrote for just about everybody, as did the German composer Claus Ogerman, particularly noted for his arrangements of Brazilian music. On any given work day in the 1960s, musicians were rushing around New York City and Los Angeles to play on these vocal sessions, a last hurrah (as we can now see) for the era of great songwriting, a sort of summing up of that era, the flower reaching its most splendid maturity just before it died.

Some of the arrangers, for a time, got to make records on their, instrumental albums in which they were allowed to use string sections. Among them were Paul Weston (whose deceptively accessible charts are of a classical purity), Frank de Vol, Frank Comstock, and most conspicuously Robert Farnon.

Many of these arrangers and composers began to influence motion picture music. They turned to film (1) for money, and (2) for a broader orchestral palette. They included Farnon, Benny Carter, Johnny Mandel, Billy Byers, Eddie Sauter, George Duning, Billy May, Patrick Williams, Michel Legrand, Allyn Ferguson, John Dankworth, Dudley Moore (whose gifts as a composer were eclipsed by his success as a comedian and actor), Johnny Keating, Pete Rugolo, Oliver Nelson, Roger Kellaway, Lennie Niehaus, Frank Comstock, Shorty Rogers, Lalo Schifrin, Tom Mclntosh, Quincy Jones, J.J. Johnson, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Mundell Lowe, and Henry Mancini who, with his Peter Gunn scores, did more to make jazz acceptable in television and movie music than anyone else in the industry's history. That is a consensus among composers.

These people profoundly affected film scoring, introducing into it elements of non-classical music that had been rigorously excluded, excepting little touches in the scores of Alex North and Hugo Friedhofer and others and the occasional use of an alto saxophone to let you know that the lady in the scene was not all she should be. The medium had been dominated by European concert-music influences. Early scores appropriated the styles and techniques of Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Brahms — and sometimes their actual music. Later the twentieth-century Europeans had an influence, up to and including Bartok and Schoenberg, though probably no one was ripped off as much as Stravinsky, whose 1913 Rite of Spring is still being quarried by film composers. In his scores for the TV series Mission: Impossible, Lalo Schifrin used scale exercises he had written for his teacher Olivier Messaien at the Paris Conservatory.

The appeal of film scoring to "jazz" composers and arrangers is obvious. Most of them had extensive classical training, and strong tastes for twentieth-century European composers, especially Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Bartok. (William Grant Still, essentially a classical composer but also an arranger who scored Frenesi for Artie Shaw, studied with Edgard Varese as far back as 1927.) This familiarity with the full orchestra inevitably led to a sense of restriction with the brass-and-saxes configuration of dance bands. Despite a general hostility of many jazz fans toward string sections as somehow effete, many of the leaders wanted to use them, and some tried to do so, among them Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, and Harry James.

These experiments were doomed for two reasons. The first was a matter of orchestral balance. A 100-member symphony orchestra will have a complement of as many as 60 string players. This is due to complex mathematical relationships in acoustics. Putting two instruments on a part does not double the volume of the sound. Far from it. To balance the other sections, a symphony orchestra needs 60 string players. But the instruments of a standard dance-jazz band can drown even the 60 strings of a symphony orchestra, as appearances of jazz bands with symphony orchestras have relentlessly demonstrated. (In the recording studio, of course, a turn of the knobs will raise the volume of the string section to any level desired.)

As far back as the 1940s, such arrangers as Paul Weston, Axel Stordahl and, in England, Robert Farnon used their work with singers as a means to explore string writing. Indeed, strings had been used in the 1930s and early '40s by singers such as Bing Crosby. But the uses of strings behind singers became much more subtle and sophisticated in the '40s, '50s, and '60s with the writing of such arrangers as Nelson Riddle, Marion Evans, Don Costa, Marty Manning, and Patrick Williams. Some jazz fans abhorred the string section; musicians know there is no more subtle and transparent texture against which to set a solo, whether vocal or instrumental.

No bandleader could afford the large string section needed to hold its own with dance-band brass-and-saxes. And so those bands who embraced them in the 1940s tried to get by with string sections of twelve players or fewer — and on the Harry James record The Mole, there are only five. There was something incongruous, even a little pitiful, in seeing these poor souls sawing away at their fiddles on the band platform, completely unheard.

During World War II, with his U.S. Army Air Force band — when money was no object, because all his players were servicemen — Glenn Miller was able to deploy 14 violins, four violas, and two celli, a total of 20 strings. But this was still hopelessly inadequate against the power of the rest of the band.

It was in film that former band arrangers were able to experiment with the uses of jazz and classical orchestral techniques, for the money they needed was there, along with a pool of spectacularly versatile master musicians who had been drawn to settle in Los Angeles for its movie and other studio work. To this day, some of the most successful fusions of jazz and classical influences have been in the movies, including such scores as Eddie Sauter's Mickey One and Johnny Mandel's The Sandpiper.

That era is gone. Gone completely. The singers of quality are of no interest to the record companies; neither are the songs from the great era of songwriting, the songs of Kern, Porter, Warren, Rodgers and Hart, Carmichael, Schwartz.

Thus the superb orchestras that used to be assembled in the 1960s to record such songs with such singers are a thing of the past. Even in the movies, the change has been total. There are no longer excellent studio orchestras on staff, and orchestral writing of any kind is comparatively rare in films. The producers long ago discovered that they could use pop records as scoring. Pop records and synthesizers. The long-chord drone of synthesizers, not even skillful but sounding like slightly more developed Hammond organs (which were used for dramatic underscore in the old radio soap operas) are heard in movies today. Only a handful of composers, and "real" musicians, are able to derive their living from movie work, or from recording.

A story circulated rapidly among musicians a few years ago. A musician was called to play on a recording session that utilized a large "acoustic" orchestra. Afterwards he was asked what it was like.

He said, "It was great. We must have put two synthesizer players out of work."

The remark is usually attributed to Conte Candoli.

Conte says he didn't say it. "But I wish I had."

A film composer was asked to submit some themes to the director of a movie. He gave him five. The director waxed enthusiastic. The next day he told the composer he was throwing out three of the themes. Why?

The director said he had played them for his daughter, and she had disliked those three.

"How old is she?" the composer asked.

"Five."

The brilliant comedy writer Larry Gelbart, creator of M.A.S.H. has said that in the movie industry today, you're dealing with fetuses in three-piece suits. It must be remembered of the current crop of executives in the entertainment industry that not only did they grow up on rock-and-roll and its branches, in many cases their parents grew up on it.

The president of the movie branch of Warner Bros, has stated publicly that he shows script ideas to his fourteeen-year-old son. If his son doesn't like them, he throws them out.

Yes, the era is over.”